In 2013 alone, 2.4 trillion USD was spent globally on mergers and acquisitions. A lot of our customers came to us because they were experiencing pain due to a disjointed infrastructure now overburdened by multiple domains.

Active Directory is critical to businesses – most customers say that 90% of their applications use Active Directory as the defacto source of authentication. Active Directory is 15 years old and we’ve added so much to it over time – more email, collaborative platforms, maybe additional forests as stop gap security measures and now, the addition of another Domain may leave your infrastructure disjointed, less secure and very difficult to manage. What happens if AD becomes inoperable for even one day? The entire organization will be brought to its knees.

What sort of expectations do you have around merging your current infrastructure with the new one?

How about the addition of users - will you treat the new users as new employees or will you run multiple domains in the short term? Many of our customers are recovering from M&A’s – either they require more visibility or they need to be able to better manage and protect their infrastructure.

Michelle Fallon has been part of the Product Marketing team at Dell Software since 2007. She is responsible for guiding and positioning Windows management solutions, specifically for Active Directory and...